Referral Review

Staff workflow prototype

Two counties, one telephone number, and a hearing in two days. The screen has a box for one of those.

The public online application asks where you live and where your problem is as two separate questions, shows you one county list if you answer 59 or under and a longer one if you answer 60 or over, and takes exactly one telephone number. It asks nothing about a court date, and the same public page tells an applicant with a hearing within three business days to ring the intake line instead. This desk reads what the applicant submitted field by field, keeps the two county answers apart, honours the channel the application allows, places any reported income against the figures published for 2026 in code, quotes the public rule or the published instruction that governs each question, and hands the file to a person. It determines no eligibility, decides no service area, answers no legal question and contacts nobody.

Measured here, end to end on one application: run one and watch. That covers the documentary work before an intake worker picks the application up. It makes no eligibility determination, no service area determination, accepts and declines nothing, sends nobody anywhere, and states no deadline.

1. Observed public screen

The questions, options and branches read on the public online application on 2026-09-15, each with its status: observed, not accessible, or added. Nothing was submitted and nothing behind the Submit button was opened.

2. Its own published instructions

What the application page tells an applicant, in its own words, quoted from that page with the date. They are that organization's instructions, never a rule of the Legal Services Corporation and never a deadline.

3. Simulation

Ten invented applications, invented applicants, invented callback notes, and the invented internal policy of an invented program. Every clause of it is labelled simulation policy, not this organization's policy.

4. Public rules, verbatim

45 CFR 1611, 1620 and 1626 and the 2026 income appendix, quoted from eCFR with the source and the date. Real rules, never paraphrased, never attributed to the organization.

What this shows

The problem
An online application arrives complete and almost empty. Somebody has to work out what is missing, which of two county answers matters, what channel the applicant allowed, what the public rules actually require, what the organization's own published instruction says, and what is reserved for a person, before an intake worker can pick it up.
The result
The run below is real and is recorded: the application read field by field, the checks run in code, the business days counted in code, the questions split between the applicant and the office, the public rule quoted verbatim, and a referral summary that names every decision it does not take.
Where it sits
It prepares a staff handoff and hands over a sheet that can be copied out. Standalone demonstration. It connects to nothing, writes into nothing, and is not a form.
What is simulated, and what is not covered
The program, the ten applications, the applicants and the internal policy are invented, and that policy is one invented program's own, not anybody's law. The observed field dictionary and the published instructions are real and are marked one by one; the screens behind the Submit button were not opened and nothing is guessed about them. There is no scanned document and no optical character recognition here, no connection to any case management system, and no eligibility determination, no service area determination, no acceptance or refusal of representation, no referral of anybody to another organization, no legal advice, no conflicts check and no deadline. The tool layer refuses all of those, and refuses a figure that is not written in a section it was cited from.
What a pilot would need from your side
A sample of real applications with the names removed, the intake policy in whatever form it exists today, and one person who can say whether an answer is right.
Who built it
Frederic de Lavenne de Choulot, The AI Pipe. Built as a demonstration, not sold as a legal, eligibility or compliance product.

Simulated intake activity

The library

Fictional desk. Do not paste real applicant, client or case records.
Enter to send, shift and enter for a new line. Live tool use over ten invented applications, the observed field dictionary, the published instructions and the public rules.